NEWS
Cut and Drawn An Animated Evening of Editors
by Michael Kunkes
 Shark Tale. Courtesy of DreamWorks. |
On March 30, the DreamWorks Animation Campus in Glendale, California, opened the doors of its Campanile Theatre for “Conver-sations About Animation Editing,” a co-presentation with the Editors Guild. Board member Sharon Smith Holley introduced a panel with a spectrum of experience that traversed the gap from conventional 2-D to sophisticated 3-D, and everything in between. The group consisted of Moderator Kent Beyda (editor, Scooby-Doo, George of the Jungle; additional editor, Robots, Fantastic Four); H. Lee Peterson, ACE (editor, Madagascar, Home on the Range, Dinosaur, Pocahontas, Aladdin, The Prince and the Pauper); Clare De Chenu (editor, Madagascar, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron; additional editor, Shark Tale); Greg Perler (editor, Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, 102 Dalmatians, Tarzan); and Nick Fletcher (editorial supervisor, Shark Tale, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron; editor, The Prince of Egypt, Balto).
 Kent Beyda. |
As animation gets cheaper to produce and the number of releases seems to nearly double yearly, the evening provided an opportunity to deconstruct the myths and misconceptions of this misunderstood but growing niche of post-production craft. What emerged was a picture of the editor as a key creative force in shaping an animated feature, sometimes before a single frame is created or a page of script written. Following is an excerpt of the discussion.
Kent Beyda: I’d like to talk about the process of creating these movies, because I don’t think people are aware of the extent to which you start with nothing and end up with a movie.
H. Lee Peterson: You start out with storyboards, very little scratch dialogue, no sound effects and usually no idea of what the music is going to be––and you’re on the show from that point. That can be as long as three to five years, and at each and every stage you are re-editing the movie.
 Clare De Chenu. |
Clare De Chenu: It starts from the script or maybe just from an idea. For us, it really starts with the storyboard artists who are pitching their ideas to the studio heads and department directors, usually acting out all the voices themselves, and it’s our job to try and translate that into the Avid.
HLP: Depending on the story artist, the cutting or the camera work may not be in the boards themselves and you have to discover that in the layout or animatic phase, which is the first place you can get the physical reality of each scene, especially with 3-D environments.
KB: Do the editors have the actual actors from the get-go, or do you record scratch tracks?
Nick Fletcher: Scratch tracks. A lot of people have acting ability, especially the story artists, so there’s never any shortage of talent. So even when we have the final voices, there are still plenty of script revisions that require us to try something. For example, on Shark Tale, we had a story artist named Shawn Bishop who is a brilliant mimic, and could perfectly duplicate the voice of Martin Scorsese.
KB: How can music inspire the cutting?
 Greg Perler. |
Greg Perler: On Tarzan, everyone thought the scene
early in the film where the parents were killed was very well executed,
but we were thinking of the mothers in the theatres who would be wondering
where all those singing monkeys were that they saw in the trailer.
Phil Collins was hired to write the songs, and he just started doing
demos for different parts of the script. There was one song that everyone
liked, and I put it at the beginning of the movie––even
though it wasn’t intended to be there. But the tone just felt
right.
Then we came up with a montage of how the baby Tarzan came to the
jungle. There was also a big battle scene between Tarzan and the villain
near the end and, very late in the game, we felt that Tarzan got lost
in the whole thing, so we decided to move the scene from the ground
up into the trees. There was very little dialogue in both sequences,
and that song became the catalyst that got us going.
KB: How important are screenings to a show’s development?
NF: Our lives are based on screenings; we’re always going from one to another, one every two or three months. It’s so important to see it on the screen to get some sense of what’s working and what isn’t. And because there are so many screenings, there are always studio people who have been waiting their turn to see it, so there are always fresh eyes.
KB: Can you tell us about Sweatbox?
GP: Sweatbox is the animation equivalent of dailies;
it’s an old Walt Disney term. The shots come in every day and
we cut them into the reel as they exist. Then all the department heads
responsible for that shot come in and we all critique it together.
Many times, animators will want to make changes to the timing and
length, and the editor is there to weigh in on whether or not the
changes are better or just different.
It’s important to remember that animators are actors and they
are focused on this one bit, and they may not even know who’s
working on the scenes around them. So in a way, the editor has to
be the guardian of the original timing and intention. Which is not
to say that there are also lots of times when timing and performance
are made infinitely better through deviation than we could imagine.
KB: What role does the editor play in the writing process?
 H. Lee Peterson. |
HLP: Sometimes a very large one. On Aladdin, Robin Williams, who played the Genie, followed the script but then gave us another million ways to go with it. In those instances, we literally transcribed every word he said into a transcript, which I would cut up into pieces and lay them on the floor––in a process I call “ransom note editing.” I’d literally create the scene out of these scraps of dialogue, tape it down and cut it that way.
KB: How has 3-D and computer animation changed the editing process?
NF: In the traditional 2-D days, layout was still doing the job of cinematography. Animators worked on large draftsman-based layout charts, and it was really hard to get an idea of how it was all going to cut. No one even dealt with the cutting room until the animation came in. Today, it’s a whole different world. For instance, I have a Linux box next to my Avid and if I am working with the director and say, “What would it be like if we moved the camera over here?” we can just create that shot and import it into the Avid. When you contrast that with our role in 2-D, it’s just extraordinary. We are involved like we never were before.
GP: I actually prefer 2-D, only because I find the intermediate stages of cel animation much more interesting to look at than the layout stages of CG. There’s a level of artistry within the rough animation and pencil tests that can be quite beautiful on its own.
KB: We are also heavily involved in sound, right?
HLP: From day one, you’re creating the soundtrack, adding footsteps, Foley, sound and sound effects. Unfortunately, we usually throw all that out at the end, but oftentimes, it ends up being part of the final track.
CDC: Sometimes, we’ll use a full temp track to create the tone of a show, plus studios are beginning to bring in a lot more songs, and that’s beginning to become a big thing.
GP: Songs provide a great framework on which to hang the movie. If you have five songs right at the start, it immediately gives you a structure. As in musical theatre, you can change them, take them out or move them to a different part of the show. It’s also a great jumping-off point for the story artists, because songs are just asking to be drawn.
 Nick Fletcher. |
NF: We can take the best music from any movie ever scored and use it for our temp score. It’s really a kind of cheating and makes us the bane of the composers who then have to match what we’ve done.
KB: What about the assistant editor?
HLP: Even though a film takes years to make, the schedule is still really tight, so it comes down to how we manage the film and work with all these other departments. And that’s where the assistants come in. I’ve worked with Mark Hester for nearly 15 years, and we don’t even have to talk…
KB: Any favorite stories or final thoughts?
HLP: I actually loved one of the first things I did at Disney, The Prince and the Pauper with Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Donald Duck. There was just something interesting about working with characters who you’ve known your whole life. There’s one scene where Mickey is with his dying father and it’s the most dramatic moment of any show I’ve ever worked on.
CDC: I got into animation in 1991, when I answered an ad from Nick Park. He was looking for someone with “cartoon room experience” and I deliberately misspelled my reply to read “cutting room experience” and got the job. Of course, maybe I was just the only one who showed up.
HLP: There are many roads to cinema city, and when editing animation, we kind of take them all…
Editors Note: The Editors Guild thanks Jim Beshears, David Tish, Marcus Taylor and Wayne Hellinger at DreamWorks and Marty Cohen at Paramount for their assistance.
Michael Kunkes is a freelance editor and writer specializing in animation, production and post-production. He can be reached at writermk@sbcglobal.net.
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